Files
fips/testing/nat
Johnathan Corgan 1c93fde672 Give each sender its own traversal offer allowance, and enforce the freshness bound at load
The incoming-offer semaphore was global with no per-sender accounting and
the permit was taken before any identity check, so one sender could hold
every slot and deny rendezvous to everyone else. Each sender now has its
own allowance with the global count kept as the outer bound. Note what
this does and does not do: it raises the cost from one keypair to a small
number of them, so a sender willing to spend throwaway identities can
still saturate the pool at unchanged total offer rate.

The signal freshness bound is only sound while the acceptance window
stays strictly inside the replay window, or an offer evicted from the
replay cache is still fresh enough to be accepted twice. The relation was
stated in a comment and enforced nowhere. Config validation now rejects
the bad combination at load, derived from the skew constant rather than a
literal, and checked regardless of whether the feature is enabled so that
turning it on later cannot surface an error at a surprising moment. The
NAT lab config generator produced a combination the new rule rejects and
is corrected in the same change.

The punch-target filter shipped with no test that would fail if it were
reverted. Loopback, link-local and multicast candidates and an oversized
list are now covered, and the cap assertion is tightened from a bound to
an equality. The private-range inclusion that LAN traversal depends on is
pinned as a healthy path so a blanket ban cannot pass.

Green: fmt, build, clippy and test --lib, 1533 passed.
2026-08-15 07:21:45 +00:00
..

NAT Lab Harness

Real Docker-based NAT traversal integration tests for the mainline FIPS Nostr/STUN bootstrap path.

This harness spins up:

  • two FIPS nodes
  • a local Nostr relay
  • a local STUN server
  • one or two Linux router containers performing NAT with iptables

For the NAT scenarios, the node LAN interfaces are not attached to Docker bridge networks. The harness creates explicit veth pairs and moves them into the node and router namespaces after docker compose up so every packet must traverse the router namespace.

It covers three scenarios:

  • cone: both peers behind explicit namespace/veth full-cone emulation, UDP traversal succeeds
  • symmetric: both peers behind symmetric-style NAT, UDP traversal fails, TCP fallback succeeds
  • lan: both peers share a LAN subnet, LAN targets are preferred over reflexive addresses

NAT model notes

The harness does not rely on plain Docker MASQUERADE for the cone case.

  • cone
    • uses explicit full-cone emulation in the router namespace
    • outbound UDP is SNATed to the router WAN address while preserving the source port
    • inbound UDP to the router WAN address is DNATed back to the single LAN host regardless of remote source
  • symmetric
    • uses UDP MASQUERADE --random-fully
    • outbound mappings may be port-randomized and are only reopened by matching conntrack state

This distinction matters because plain MASQUERADE is convenient source NAT, but it does not by itself model the "accept from any remote once mapped" behavior expected from a full-cone NAT.

Prerequisites

  • Docker with Compose support
  • locally built fips-test:latest

Build the test image with:

./testing/scripts/build.sh

Run

Run all scenarios:

./testing/nat/scripts/nat-test.sh

Run one scenario:

./testing/nat/scripts/nat-test.sh cone
./testing/nat/scripts/nat-test.sh symmetric
./testing/nat/scripts/nat-test.sh lan

Layout

  • docker-compose.yml
    • relay/STUN/WAN topology plus container definitions
  • node/
    • node bootstrap wrapper that waits for the injected veth interface
  • router/
    • NAT router image and iptables setup
  • stun/
    • minimal STUN binding responder
  • relay/
    • local strfry config
  • scripts/generate-configs.sh
    • derives ephemeral identities and writes per-scenario FIPS configs
  • scripts/setup-topology.sh
    • injects and configures the NAT LAN veth pairs in the container namespaces
  • scripts/nat-test.sh
    • boots the lab, waits for convergence, and asserts the resulting path

Assertions

  • cone

    • both nodes connect
    • connected transport is UDP
    • active link remote addresses are on the WAN NAT subnet
  • symmetric

    • NAT bootstrap does not establish a UDP link
    • fallback converges
    • connected transport is TCP via router-published WAN addresses
  • lan

    • both nodes connect
    • connected transport is UDP
    • active link remote addresses stay on the shared LAN subnet